I am reading this mans essays because /lit/ loves him and I cant

>>8542247
Read his short story "Good Old Neon". Responds to that exact accusation in a very satisfying way. Probably my favorite thing of his. It's in Oblivion. The ending is fucking beautiful.

>>8542266

Good Old Neon just took the themes of the book Brief Interviews and made them super obvious, that story did little for me when I read it.

>>8542247
you're right OP But you're gonna get flamed by pseuds soon.

>>8542247

It's someone who's not as intelligent as he thinks he is appealing to people not as intelligent as they think they are. Nothing in DFW's oeuvre can be considered in-depth or complex, not really. And he wasn't well versed in the world of politics or philosophy, which is unfortunate because his grand statements always seemed to focus around basic existential thoughts, rendering them trite and contrived.

DFW impresses those of whom have never forayed into the world of postmodern literature before, but the more you research his influences, the more you realise he was just extremely good at plagiarising more intellectual material and offloading this in a more pop-accessible format, not unlike the Beatles.

He was a narcissist who had never really experienced the world beyond his small midwestern boyhood and as such lacked the credentials to write fiction that mattered on a global scale. He was aware of this, and resorted to trying to be a casual intellectual who could only appeal to socially misunderstood pseuds who've self-diagnosed themselves with depression. Aw, shucks, I'm just a regular guy, and but so allow me to go high-brow with this formal logic philosophy I learned in my last year of my undergraduate course, and but so.'

The reason /lit/ idolises David Foster Wallace is the same reason /fit/ idolises Zyzz. If you can't figure out what these similarities are, then you're in luck: you've found people just like you. If you can - you've already left.

>>8542247
Some essays are better than others, Consider the Lobster and Supposedly Fun Thing are probably my least favorite. I think Big Red Son is a great one though as well as the Grammar Usage one.
>>8542287
? Brief Interviews was more of him mocking people and asserting his intellectual morality on to people. Good Old Neon I thought was more about the difficulty in coming to terms with doing all the stuff that should make you a "good person" but still feeling like a lonely, inauthentic shit bag and connecting it to the lonely failures of meta fiction.

why does /lit/ think everything is a contest in proving who's the most intelligent?
ever stopped to consider that maybe people just find dfw's writing enjoyable? infinite jest is a lot of fun to read but because some people don't agree they assume that everyone else must be merely pretending to like it to look smart because it's a big book. this is idiotic.

>>8542329

Because all DFW cared about was making people think he was incredibly intelligent, and equated this with the writing of great literature...

desu i like listening to him speak more than i like his writing. he clearly had problems processing information. the consider the lobster anthology is a mess.

>>8542247
The whole "dfw was just trying to convince people he was intelligent" thing is weird man.

The guy spent his entire literary career trying to prove that he was different from the obviously hyper-intellectual writers in his field (Pynchon etc.) I mean what more can he do in order not to convince you that he's intelligent. Do you want him to write airport fiction or something?

>>8542366
Same with Gaddis. Same with Joyce. Same with Pynchon. Same with Borges. Same with McElroy.

Every meme-tier author in this board is "difficult." They were all trying to prove something. And everyone here is trying to prove something by reading them. That's why we're here.

As if "trying to appear smart" ruins a book anyway. Stop thinking so much about an author's intelligence (or lack thereof) while reading a book. You're just recognizing yourself. That's why you're offended. Because, really, you believe you're the only one who's allowed to feel that way.

>>8542402

No, all of the authors you mentioned were actually able to do something with their intelligence and say something meaningful.

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>>8542310
tldr

>>8542310
sounds about right

> 'look hiw smart I am and youre so smart for reading this'

this is especially apparent in some of his interviews. he's like "does that make any sense to you?" after meandering through the most uninsightful and vague assumptions about society

>>8542247
You're right he's literally inauthentic. He doubted everything he ever said and I don't hold that against him but he was right to.

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>>8542450
>meaningful

>>8542310
I read Supposedly Fun Thing (the book) and thought that he was a semi-intelligent guy that was way over his head about how intelligent he thought he was and tried really hard to appeal to the "common man" in a way that was really condescending and fake. However, I thought some of the points he made were nice and the childhood tennis essay was great. What would you reccomend to me that would help break these illusions DFW planted in my head?

/lit/ falling for the "DFW is intelligent" meme pushed by reviews and marketing.

DFW's "intelligence," is really nothing more than an aesthetic thing and he always knew that.

>>8542310
Absolutely off base, resentment charged miss-assessment.

I'm more intelligent then everyone in this thread, everyone on this board, really. I really am.

>>8542450
Pynchon is the baby boomer equivalent of DFW. Also I hate how American aıthors try to write non-fictional stuff in fiction. It dilutes the concept's depth and seriousness and makes it look like a fraud.

>>8544078

I mean, some of what he wrote is nice to read. A few chapters in IJ that don't take themselves too seriously, The Soul is not a Smithy, Good Old Neon, Big Red Son. They're very well made pieces. It's just that he could never reach the intellectual or globally significant heights he aspired to like Pynchon or Gaddis because he lacked the raw intelligence and the life experience. His 9/11 essay, or really any time he attempted to discuss politics, is indicative of this. As is any time he uses mathematics (Eschaton relying on first year undergraduate calculus and purely designed to impress English lit majors). Philosophy. Not to mention just how many mistakes he makes in general. Only someone with the very upper class privileged perpetually unchallenged highly educated Midwestern life could misread American Psycho as a negative treatise on nihilism.

http://thetalkhouse.com/novelist-and-screenwriter-bret-easton-ellis-the-canyons-talks-james-ponsoldts-the-end-of-the-tour/

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/09/david-foster-wallace-genius-fabulist-would-be-murderer/261997/

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/david-foster-wallace-and-the-perils-of-litchat

For more information.

>>8542310
You gave away that you were projecting when you used whom incorrectly

DFW never reached history-level greatness. But Pychon and Gaddis? They're pretty much cancer.

>>8542310
idk about philosophy, but the politics part is very true, see also music/movies/general culture

I can't be sure bc he was secretive about what books he read, but he seems to have mostly only read books published after 1955.

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>it's a /lit/ gets jested thread

Listen, you guys have a lot more DFW to read before you 'get' his absolute genius... c'mon, you can trust the industry hype machine...

>>8542266
does it even address this? isnt it just an adaptation of notes from underground

>At first I suspected
he didn’t like me or was uneasy around me. I don’t think he was
used to patients who were already aware of what their real problem
was.

>I didn’t even tell him how
unhappy I was until five or six months into the analysis, mostly because I didn’t want to seem like just another whining, self-absorbed yuppie...

>>8544897

That horrifying part of IJ where he describes the shriek of a car in the note of d minor. DFW lacked the erudition and world knowledge he so desperately craved.

>>8545875
>describes the shriek of a car in the note of d minor
God I hope he didn't do this. It makes no sense.

good old neon is just good will hunting in a dark mirror

>>8544897
there are a lot of references to things before 1955... like a lot

>>8546794
I meant idk how many books he read that weren't from the more modern period not counting when he was in high school or whatever, not general knowledge of things and events from before 1955.
I don't really care much about stuff like >>8545875
even though lol, but it is true that his field of knowledge was much more narrow than he either himself thought or that he wanted other people to think it was, he wasn't just a "genius" in everything.

>>8544928
No I wouldn't give it anywhere near that credit to amount to Dostoevsky. Thematically its only parrelel is a private admission of self loathing but thats the only superficial similarity

>>8547582
this comes from reading the bio btw, relevant: http://flavorwire.com/326276/david-foster-wallaces-formative-reading-list (scroll to tags if you don't want to go through the slideshow)

>>8542247
Certainly a mediocre artist and thinker, but in his own way, a genius. He was able through sheer autism to purify the language of the tribe because he himself never rose above it. He operated in a space most writers get over in their teens or early 20s

His gift was essentially being able to dramatize and make into art his own problems and concerns which are in turn the problems and concerns of the vulgar mass of pop culture kiddies.

This is why he is beloved by those new to literature reading one of their first big boy books (and why many on /lit/ still hold him dear, nostalgia)

I think he'll have a place in the literary YA canon with Salinger etc

>>8542310
>>8544078
>>8544259
>>8544897

This is why I don't come to /lit/ anymore, really...
All this board has become is 18 year olds with a strange jealousy complex who think they're on par with authors like Delillo and DFW in terms of intellect just because they were raised on the internet. All this sounds like is self-conscious babble spewed by insecure young men who see DFW as nothing more than a prime example of "pseudo-intellect" who tried his hardest to write a book that would be canonized. He never claimed any of these things you guys claimed he tried to do. How does distilling one's influences into a more digestible piece of work considered bad? I'm sorry you can't pretend to understand calculus in IJ as much as you can in GR.
>He was a narcissist who had never really experienced the world beyond his small midwestern boyhood

He was committed to a fucking halfway house near Harvard after his suicide attempt at 28; he spent a large amount of time hearing the stories of the people who were in there, who were mostly ex-cons. All the AA stories in IJ were more-than-likely a retelling of the stories he heard while he was in there. If that falls into "midwestern boyhood" then you have a fairly limited worldview, to be quite honest.

I feel that DFW triggers the people who he wanted to trigger: the arrogant blowhards who took things far too seriously, who over-intellectualized things to an extreme until they became trapped in a world of their own; this is what DFW was warning against in IJ. The fact that all you could gain from DFW's work was a sense of contrived intellectualism speaks far more about you than it does DFW. I can go so far as to say that DFW completely baited and reeled you in.

Also
>formal logic

holy fucking kek... if you can't see Wittgenstein's influence all over his work, the whole premise of IJ, then you don't deserve to read, really.

the worst post I've ever read desu
you should be ashamed, you fucking psued

>>8542310
Except you are wrong. What separates DFW from those with no discernible talent is his lucidity and clarity of thought. Maybe the truths he found were superficial, but they all are. The same cliches will be repeated over and over for a reason(all is vanity), what separates the talented ones from the rest is how they can discover those old truths working in (apparently) new social realities.

>>8547678
hey hey I'm not calling him a pseudo-intellectual >>8544897
just that he isn't an expert in everything he wrote about, he has his limits as we all do.

>>8547678
dfw triggers me because he was mediocre, didactic, a hollow moralizer, and some of the essays are truly titanically awful: the prescriptivism essay, the irony essay, the kafka remarks, etc. He also completely misunderstood mathematics, pharmacology, and Wittgenstein, but put freshman-textbook misreadings of him in his books to make people who never studied anything think he was smart

>>8547733
I guarantee you learned the word "didactic" from one of his essays.

I do agree his understanding of mathematics was very skewed (Pemulis' endnote was more-or-less correct, but he DFW used the wrong theorem -- or it was just characterization) and his book on infinity was awful.

Other than that, he really has done what all other Western literary minds do: they packaged old concepts into the time they lived in.

Get used to it.

also his Kafka essay was spot-on.
I remember when I was 17 and I thought Kafka was only MUH SAD

>>8547733

compare to Pynchon, who deeply understood the subjects he was weaving into his attempts at the encyclopedic novel. Moreover, the presence of these things served his artistic purpose. He put them in because they were part of the world and everything was related in his vision. The result is startling new visions of the world and its interconnected parts. DFW is not like this: he is trying to impress you, but if you know anything about any of the topics he footnotes, then you know it is freshman textbook plagiarism. The whole thing makes me smell a fart.

DFW will be forgotten in time, because the reasons people like him are extremely local and largely in terms of cultural cache. He does not translate well, every Spanish and French person I have talked to is bewildered by his prolixity compared to how little fucking content there is.

>>8547740

You shouldn't make stupid guarantees like that, you might lose all faith in yourself.

You know mathematics so you can see through it. I'm telling you the same is true of his readings of philosophy, psychopharm, addiction, linguistics, oh god linguistics. that fucking prescriptivism essay

>kafka essay

ah yes. wallace saying kafka is so far at the forefront of his reactionary campaign to obliterate "irony" that even metaphors must be outlawed as bad

>>8542310
well he really knew a lot about math, no lies there

>>8547742

Who the fuck reads DFW for the "smart" stuff?
Pychon is nothing but a wise-crack, at least DFW comes across as a fucking human being in his writing.

>>8547740
>not thinking kafka is funny reading him at 17 w/o dfw having to tell you

>>8544214
go to bed, Dave.

>>8547759
Pynchon is a wise-crack only in the eyes of literary types who don't know shit and are easily overwhelmed.

>>8542381
>spent his entire literary career trying to prove
i can't believe you read literature and miss something as obvious as that.
what do you think his motivation for that would be? Because it SCREAMS insecurity

>>8547678

Calculus in GR was actually topical and interwoven in a coherent way. DFW's line of thinking was literally 'well if Pynchon did it I probably should too!' so he added in very basic calculus in a very inorganic way. It's just there because he wanted to impress lit majors, not because it develops or links to the themes at play...

Lol, have you read the letters he sent from the halfway house? He couldn't connect with anyone there, they all disliked him and figured he was some stupid yuppie trying to get material for his novel, which ironically he was. He had no understanding of people who grew up in different social-economic conditions to him. He sent a letter to his editor incredulously saying everyone at the halfway house had a tattoo! DFW's relation to understanding the world outside his narrow prism of experience is quite similar to someone thinking they know Baltimore inside out after watching The Wire. But The Wire is a work of fiction, a highly educated white man's work of fiction. And as such cannot reflect reality.

re: wittgenstein, see my notes earlier on plagiarising things and selling them off in a more pop-digestible format. Also recognise the fact that Dave misread witty a lot.

What really annoys me was his enclosed attempts to try and act like he knew more than he did. This is insufferably obvious when he discusses film, music, philosophy, popular culture, politics, general world history...

We don't need a reading list of his formative works, it's pretty obvious what he borrowed from for inspiration.

>>8547678
DFW misunderstood the most basic elements of Wittgenstein, see that one footnote about private language.

Bump, this interests me.

>>8548178
literally the only thing related to calculus i remember being in GR was a straight forward integral joke. something about log(cabin

am i forgetting something? there might have been an equation for some aspect of the V2 as well but I don't think it was particularly salient.

it's hard to say that dfw didnt know what he was doing when he integrating calculus into his novel since he was a universal genius in all respects. the infinite jest is a novel that contains all other novels within it and without it and therefore is also an absorption and recalibration and reinterpretation of western literature's goals. if there is one thing to be said about david foster wallace it's that he was far ahead of his time when it came to the mechanics of novelistic understanding - plot, character, metaphor - these were devices he used extrinsically as well as intrinsically in order to make his point that american cultural life is a capitalistic/fetishized amalgam of various influences. wallace was partly inspired by william gaddis and don delillo in this respect. the book's fractal and contralinear structure is another testament to wallace's genius, as the structure of the book invites us to elaborate and extemporize our own ends, which are also the characters' ends. wallace in this respect is playing with 'means and ends,' in the mathematical and pragmatical senses, bertrand russell and wittgenstein here being the main influences. influences, though, of course, are one of the subjects of infinite jest as the characters meander through the narrative under the 'influence' of various substances which are of course a metaphor for american compulsion in general. infinite jest's goal may be said to be to liberate the reader from the mire of aleatory informal thought, and in that sense i think it succeeds, on that level, as well as just being downright entertaining. perhaps the best novel of the 20th century after ulysses and in search of lost time.

>>8542402
Why people keep saying Borges is difficult? He reads like a uncle or a grandpa telling comfy stories at night round the fireplace, only this uncle / grandpa is extremely well read and erudite.

The man even includes little explanations of the story's themes and influences in his prefaces, for god's sake.

>>8544181
i don't know how people fail to see this

every time I read his stuff i picture him writing it with a smirk on his face as some sort of joke, in a very self-conscious way

he's a good writer

>>8549359

tim?

>>8547749
I honestly don't really know anything about linguistics. Is his Authory and American Usage essay really that bad? I thought he have good arguments for trying to tone down descriptivism while maintaining the idea that prescriptivism is useful (to an extent).

What was bad about it? Again, I don't know anything about linguistics, so maybe that is it in and if itself.

>>8542402
First off, I actually like Gaddis, Joyce, all I've read of Pynchon, and detest Borges and can't/haven't read McElroy. I think you're just assuming that because you're too stupid or impatient to read and enjoy them, everyone else is. Hell, I even love Gass.

But I agree there's a super pretentious trend on /lit/ to only talk about the biggest, baddest, most ambitious and difficult books. What's the last time you've seen simple but great books like Miss Lonelyhearts and Babbitt mentioned? It's not like these are huge masterpieces, but critically, they offer much to talk about.

>>8547742
>bewildered by his prolixity compared to how little fucking content there is.
This, DFW is the definition of an autist, it may have been the antidepressants making him ramble like that*. He uses a shitload of unnecessarily obscure words, parenthetic asides and footnotes/endnotes, clauses within clauses within clauses**, etc. There's this phony self-awareness in it that could only appeal to the most sentimental and undeveloped 15 year old, one also impressed by shows of faux-learning*** and "avant-garde" and experimental crap that may have been revolutionary in the early 20th century**** but which now seems retarded and stuck up*****, as evidence see this:******

*although it seems more like he was using amphetamines, what with logorrhea being a common side effect of such
**kind of like what I'm doing right now, but not in a metafictional tittypinching way but really to try to make the reader pay attention and feel something, you know what I mean?
***like the over-reliance on pharmaceutical and psychological and technical terminology (usually wrong or oversimplified or quite simplistic but draped in obscure words) and mathematical terms(a.)
****it really wouldn't have
*****for all his hypocritical diatribes on writing sincere, emotional, and non-self-absorbed fiction unlike Pynchon, Barth, Borges et al.
******https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/w/wallace-brief.html(b.)

(a.) Also often wrong
(b.) (a truly bad piece of work which exemplifies everything I've said in my post IMO)

Lol, this thread is so funny.

Underaged and severely obese basement dweller who have never put a step outside their house writing that "Wallace had no real life experience".

Jesus, 4chan is really a joke. Only americans can be so terminally retarded.

>>8549533
10/10 troll post

and DFW is the king of all trolls

>>8549493
>*although it seems more like he was using amphetamines, what with logorrhea being a common side effect of such
I don't think I've ever heard of him using stimulants. I forget if the bio* or any other articles have gone into it, but I wouldn't be surprised if DFW slid more into the manic-depressive side instead of just unipolar depression which the doctors seemed to have thought he had, iirc.**


*are there any other bios in the works? ELSIAGS is really good, but you can tell the author was limited bc so many still living people were involved/not willing to hurt other's feelings/air out the family dynamics. Aren't there also a bunch of gfs who didn't want to participate, or not in depth?
**And commonly medicine meant for unipolar depression can cause people with bipolar to spiral/go into a manic phase and really fuck them up and not help in the same way in can for unipolar depressives.

>>8549614
googled:
>"So much has been written about the link between mental illness and creative genius. Do you think he would have been uncomfortable with being seen as another example of that linkage?
He might have been. He was very frightened of the diagnosis of bipolar condition, which is the classic productive literary personality. He was very uncomfortable with it. He much preferred having a diagnosis of atypical depression. I think that may suggest that he didn’t want to identify with those people. If you think about the people he identified with – Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo – I don’t think there’s even a whiff of such a condition in those people. He identified with these straight arrows who produced every day."

and

>"During one stay at the psychiatric unit of a hospital, “the doctors likely considered the possibility that he suffered from bipolar disorder, manic depression.” But they ended up putting him on Nardil, which treats atypical depression. He would stay on this drug until a year before he died."

and :(

>"Activation of mania: Phenelzine can activate manic episodes in people with bipolar disease and can cause rapid cycling between mania and depression. Psychosis, self-destructive behavior and violence can occur. Depressed people should be screened for bipolar disease before beginning treatment with phenelzine."

>>8549624
oh wow
"Controversy
In 2003, Pfizer reformulated the inactive ingredients in Nardil; users noticed a change in the effectiveness of the drug and began to experience side effects and loss of effectiveness of the drug. There have been complaints that the change was made to cut expenses in manufacturing the drug and that the manufacturer has been unresponsive to the needs of the customers."

why are things so fucked up

>>8549635
>>8549624
>>8549614
I'm not gonna lie and say I don't feel bad for him, but he was still a trashy writer. Hell, if his writings make you feel better, I can't get rid of that, but I think he was objectively a terrible writer.

>>8549652
I wasn't posting that to argue otherwise, just sad how the more I read the more his death seems to have been caused by a number of preventable screwups/deliberate screwups.

DFW being in denial about aspects of his character/ what his strengths were and were not is relevant to the main discussion though.

>>8549684
I guess, yeah.

>>8549533

You can't be serious. DFW objectively lived a very sheltered life

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>tfw you're a sheltered pseudo intellectual white male and all the criticisms of DFW in this thread apply to you but you're even more stupid and worse at writing than he was

>>8542690

There are echoes of the sublime in their work. They were consummate prose stylists. They said something interesting about value. Wallace had some foggy ideas about entertainment, laziness, ennui, but the only echoes in Wallace's work are of his own neuroses.

DFW is the only thing I ever agreed on with Dan Schneider.

>>8549880
oof well then shut the fuck up and get better at writing

do yourself and everyone else a favor, take steps to excise your self-hate instead of wallowing in it

>>8542247
>He is missing any kind of an inner core that would make his work matter and I'm afraid thats exactly why he killed himself.
It is:

>His magnum opus, Infinite Jest, is a 1000-page novel full of intestinally-shaped sentences and fine-print notes on calculus, organic chemistry and VCR programming. Normally, when a book like that comes out, people realise its purpose right away: terrorising B.A. students into meek submission. Wallace, however, found a very shrewd way to counter this by pretending that his work was really “a late-night conversation with really good friends, when the bullshit stops and the masks come off.” So instead of menacing the reader in the old Joycean way, Wallace chums it up whenever the technical stuff appears, acting like he really doesn’t mean to discourage anyone. Swapping lecture theatre dread for tutorial group paternalism – that’s the aesthetic in a nutshell. (And even if he IS being dense on purpose, it’s all for our own good of course.)

>This is where DFW’s suicide has really paid off – without a corpse, it’s harder to convince your audience that insincerity qualifies you for victim status, no matter how much you “struggle” with it. Nowadays Wallace is seen as a brilliant young(ish) author who was tragically tiger-mothered to death, killed by his own voluminous intelligence. None of his buddies fail to relate how friendly and approachable his writing supposedly is, either. In the New Yorker, Jonathan Franzen is tactful enough to deny that Wallace was a saint, only to mention “how recognised and comforted, how loved, his most devoted readers feel when reading [his fiction].” But Franzen paints an unpleasant picture of Wallace’s private life, even suggesting he killed himself to “betray as hideously as possible those who loved him best.” Yet while “David” was all-too-willing to hurt his wife and con his psychiatrists, Franzen wants us to believe he had nothing but frankness and affection for thousands of readers he’d never met.

http://exiledonline.com/david-foster-wallace-portrait-of-an-infinitely-limited-mind/#more-33148

The bandana is a dead giveaway. A code for "look how sensitive I am".

Me, I'd go for a relentless cultivation of the plain style. Makes foreshadowings and plants much more satisfying. Makes it also funnier to let go with experiments on occasion. E.g. the synaestesia in Tiger! Tiger! by Alfred Bester.

>>8548178
>He sent a letter to his editor incredulously saying everyone at the halfway house had a tattoo!
Lol 9001 niggawutz?

That was in 1990. True, it was a different society then. But being surprised then, when it definitely was a social mark.

>DFW's relation to understanding the world outside his narrow prism of experience is quite similar to someone thinking they know Baltimore inside out after watching The Wire. But The Wire is a work of fiction, a highly educated white man's work of fiction. And as such cannot reflect reality.
I beg to differ. The Wire isn't a guide to Baltimore. But if the writers do a good research, then it can say something about Baltimore.

>>8549493
My morian!

>His magnum opus, Infinite Jest, is a 1000-page novel full of intestinally-shaped sentences and fine-print notes on calculus, organic chemistry and VCR programming. Normally, when a book like that comes out, people realise its purpose right away: terrorising B.A. students into meek submission. Wallace, however, found a very shrewd way to counter this by pretending that his work was really “a late-night conversation with really good friends, when the bullshit stops and the masks come off.” So instead of menacing the reader in the old Joycean way, Wallace chums it up whenever the technical stuff appears, acting like he really doesn’t mean to discourage anyone. Swapping lecture theatre dread for tutorial group paternalism – that’s the aesthetic in a nutshell. (And even if he IS being dense on purpose, it’s all for our own good of course.)

This is a misrepresentation. Yes, Wallace wanted to write a magnum opus and often he couldn't help showing off, but that doesn't mean the whole novel is insincere and masturbatory. Wallace doesn't "chum it up whenever the technical stuff appears"; you may find his smart-but-casual writing style grating or even insulting (some do, I don't), but Wallace never switches styles when things get hard, that's just made up. The whole article is full of stuff that sounds kind of true about Wallace and his work but doesn't hold up to scrutiny, and the writer makes Infinite Jest sound way harder and less fun than it actually is.

>>8550004
lol
that article's good, I think he's a little too harsh on IJ bc there is good stuff under the gimmicks and his boring addiction hang ups, but everything else is spot on

>>8550004
I can't believe Vollmann is a real person and existing writer, he's like a character Tim Heideicker would play. Does anyone even read or like him? On goodreads his most popular book has 1,777 ratings and the second most read has 878.

>>8549652

Who are you to judge, subhuman trash? Have you ever wrote a book? Hell, you have not seen the fucking daylight since your poor mother bring yoi to the world, you are a burden to everyone in you family because you do nothing all day except for posting sentences on this anime website... you should kill yourself fast and quietly, not judge the work we all can measure (because it exists) of a man you can't even aspire to comprehend.

He's not great, but he's good. Leave it at that.

>>8550088
Really likes this little trashings:

>(8) Further proof Wallace didn’t know shit about drug culture after the 70s. In his TV essay, “E Unibus [sic] Pluram” [sic] he writes: “My real dependency here is not on a single show or a few networks any more than the hophead’s is on the Turkish florist or the Marseilles refiner.” By the 90s, the French Connection was history, Turkey no longer grew much illicit opium and only beatnik-wannabe posers used words like “hophead.”

>(10) Doctors know perfectly well why alcoholics’ hearts are enlarged. It’s called cardiomyopathy.

>>8550110
I'm afraid that Vollmann is a real person with a nasty fixation on whores.

>>8550185
>(8)
>not picking up on the fact Wallace was trying to be funny

>>8550192
>Unfortunately, methadone isn’t useless or paradoxical enough to get Wallace’s respect (just as he won’t admit his own arse got saved by something as un-literary as a mere psych drug). He even has one of his heroes, a former Demerol addict called Gately, play a vicious prank by hanging a sign on the clinic door reading: “CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE BY ORDER COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS.” That’s how much he hates ‘doners.

>In fact, there’s something very alcoholic about his junkie characters. They get off on frat-boy sadism like the “Closed”-sign incident. They find Anonymous groups more natural than substitution therapy. And the transvestite harrassed by those anting ants spends two weeks (!) withdrawing, drinking codeine syrup (with the same alcohol content as vodka!) and getting Lost-Weekend-style animal hallucinations. In a ludicrously short time, he develops full-blown alcoholism with DTs. You wonder if this is because Wallace can only describe booze addiction, and needs some excuse to put it in the story.

>>8542247
>it amounts to is 'look hiw smart I am and youre so smart for reading this'. He is missing any kind of an inner core

Holy.. I want more

>>8550205
tl;dr

>>8550192
ok yes with that and probably with the 60s retro drugs referenced, but not with the reactionary puritan stuff or his beliefs about AA/addiction that DF appeared to genuinely hold
>>8550185
I swear it must be part of the mkultra pt 2 war on drugs to drive the down and out to suicide by having to interact with Vollmann to make a few bucks. It could be interesting, though implausible bc it's likely straight up made up, to interview some of the sex workers Vollmann distorts in his own hideous image about the truth of their lives and his interactions with them.

>>8550205
I do wonder...if DFW wasn't a much bigger drinker than he let on, we already know he was secretive and it's not that hard to be a secrete drunk up to a certain point. He may have wanted to downplay that as he seems to have wanted to downplay any possibility he was bipolar not unipolarly depressed.

>>8547826
I fail to see your point. If he's insecure about appearing too intelligent, then he isn't just out to convince the reader of his intelligence, is he?

>>8550278
He wasn't especially intelligent:
>is in 1990 amazed that people on halfway-houses has tattoos
>mixes up milli*litres* and milli*grams*
And so fucking on.

>DFW is one of my favourite authors
>was also a ranked junior tennis player
>gets his rocks off to federer also

I'm sad he's gone, with the immediate standard of tennis prior and post his death he could have written many more essays on the modern game.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20federer.html

>>8547760
Wtf I find Kafka funny now

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>>8542247
>/lit/ loves him
Is this a meta joke about the meta joke?

>>8550362
What if he's just, once again, trying to come off as smart and insightful.

>>8544226
I disagree. It depends on its execution. If your own purpose in writing is to meditate, especially on one specific event in your life, and try to discover the meaning/significance of or just simply why or how (why these humans behave the way they do and what does this say about/contribute to the human condition) these things and events occur, then there's absolutely nothing wrong in basing these fictional events on real experiences. So long as it's subtle and creative. Because of this, there's a clear distinction between a memoir and an autobiography.

>>8542310
now I be cry :'(

>>8542318
I don't think BI was that. Did you not feel a sense of very real human pain lurking beneath the surface of much it, made believable because it was so oblique? Plus Forever Overhead is just so lovely.

>>8550079
>Yes, Wallace wanted to write a magnum opus and often he couldn't help showing off, but that doesn't mean the whole novel is insincere and masturbatory.

I just browsed his "A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again." Notes galore.

>>8542318
I have no idea how you could read a collection including things like Quartet and The Depressed Person without seeing the self-deprecation there. And given his own sexual history, he basically was one of those "hideous men".

>>8549335
He also called the SS initials a double integral I think. That and the Poisson distribution, though that's not calculus.

>>8550004
The Vollman part was convincing enough, and I have to admit the Dog the Bounty Hunter quotes bit was funny, but there was a priggish sense of moral superiority and political posturing to the whole thing.

>>8542329
This. Read the book as a black comedy. The irony in many of the sick scenarios are amazing.

>>8550004
god why do people still post this fucking article holy shit the whole thing is so awful

>>8550234
to clarify, dfw if I remember correctly, made it sound like pot was his biggest issue before he went to AA, but it always seems like he's actually talking about alcohol so maybe it was more that but he didn't want to seem too hacky by focusing on that post sobriety, don't think he was drinking post AA or whatever

>>8551793
I think it came out that he was on heroin for a while in some biography or another. Though he went to AA so he started thinking about addiction in their terms.

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>>8549359
>when integrating calculus into his novel

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>>8552096
nothing like that in Ghost Story(ELSiaGS), apparently there was some rumors about DFW being a heroin addict or cokehead around IJ, but I don't really buy that
from AoDYEUBY
Vollmann, what a bitch/DFW w/ the blind item here

>>8553105
and then right below he goes into his noo I've never been to AA act so who knows, I don't think he had the constitution to go out seeking hard drugs, but this has gotten off...track

To stick up for him: DF being wrong about a bunch of stuff and having literally DARE Reagan politics once you scratch the surface doesn't make him a bad writer, worse writers have bought into worse stuff and made dumber mistakes

>>8549335
Quite early in the book he likened something that was diminishing to the tail end of a converging taylor series.

>>8542310
>comparing him to the Beatles
>implying that's a bad thing

>>8553121

Nah. It's obvious from the narration in IJ relating to the characters addicted to opiates/opioids that DFW never spent much/any time actually doing them. His drugs of choice were alcohol and marijuana -- made all the more evident through his description of opiate intoxication and withdrawal. The effects are sensationalized and basically completely off the mark and bear more similarities to the effects of his own personal DOC. I realize IJ is set in a fictional reality, but for example Talwin hadn't been in vogue for medical practice nor commonly prescribed for 20+ years at the time he was writing the novel, and yet this was the DOC of one of the main characters.

That said, it's kind of missing the forest for the trees. The sections dealing with addiction are less about stating a completely accurate, 100% medically/scientifically factual account of each particular substance, and instead trying to illustrate how drugs (regardless of the specific kind or class) and the cycle of addiction ruins peoples' lives, and how seemingly banal and tired cliches can help break the cycle and redeem the addict. A lot of it becomes clear when you learn a bit more about AA and the sort of self-help literature that was popular in the 90s.

>>8553312

The fact that so many books still name the Beatles as "the greatest or most significant or most influential" rock band ever only tells you how far rock music still is from becoming a serious art. Jazz critics have long recognized that the greatest jazz musicians of all times are Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, who were not the most famous or richest or best sellers of their times, let alone of all times. Classical critics rank the highly controversial Beethoven over classical musicians who were highly popular in courts around Europe. Rock critics are still blinded by commercial success. The Beatles sold more than anyone else (not true, by the way), therefore they must have been the greatest. Jazz critics grow up listening to a lot of jazz music of the past, classical critics grow up listening to a lot of classical music of the past. Rock critics are often totally ignorant of the rock music of the past, they barely know the best sellers. No wonder they will think that the Beatles did anything worthy of being saved.

>>8544897
The things Infinite Jest alludes to most frequently are Hamlet and The Brothers Karamazov, so it's clear he had at least some grounding in the older canonical stuff. I do think most of his actual literary influences were post-1950 Americans and Latin Americans, though, which isn't such a bad thing in itself.

>>8547742
This isn't a real response to what you said, but I hate how everybody assumes Pynchon is some expert on math and science because he did a single year of undergraduate work in engineering physics. His calculus education was just as underdeveloped as Wallace's. He was an English major who wrote technical documents for Boeing, and does essentially the same thing you (and others in this thread) accuse Wallace of doing: using really basic math and physics to wow English lit majors.

>>8549429
Good luck getting specifics out of that guy. That might actually open him up to being refuted!